Source EuroNews
The Spanish consulate in Ukraine this week began registering some 30 babies born by surrogate mothers, who had been blocked from leaving the country due to concerns over human trafficking and medical malpractice in the industry.
Every year, aspiring parents from across Europe make similar journeys — dodging surrogacy bans at home by travelling abroad and spending large sums of money in their bid to have a baby.
Source The Guardian
For women intending to undergo IVF treatment using frozen eggs, the younger they are when they are frozen the greater the chance of a successful pregnancy, according to a report by the UK’s independent fertility regulator.
Most IVF treatment cycles use fresh eggs, but a very small number use eggs that have been frozen and thawed. It can, for example, be especially beneficial for cancer patients who decide to freeze their eggs before undergoing chemotherapy.
The report by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) looked at data from UK fertility clinics from 2010 to 2016, and found that the key factor for successful pregnancies is the age at which women freeze their eggs.
Source The Sun
A WOMAN who was the youngest person in the UK to go through menopause at the age of 11 has now has now had her dreams come true by giving birth to her first baby.
Amanda Lewis, 31, from Nuneaton, was told by doctors that she would never have kids, but has managed to start a family with partner Tom Hill, 28, thanks to an egg donor.
She proudly showed off four-week-old son Oryn on Lorraine this morning.
The pole dance and fitness instructor told the host: “I still don’t believe it to be honest. Last September I had an investigation and internal scans, which showed that my uterus is really really tiny, it was really really thin so I had to go on a high HRT.
“It was very high hormones that I was on, but we got there in about four weeks, I got to the right lining.
Source Washington Post
Christina Fenn and her husband, Brian, have driven an hour and a half to this quaint coffee shop in Monroe, Conn. Fenn sips her morning latte, skittishly glancing out the window at the parking lot. “I’m nervous,” she says, grabbing her husband’s arm. “Nervous-excited, though.” He smiles back.
She’s wearing green, her lucky color. Green shirt and green jacket, green bracelets, green socks. She feels as if she needs all the luck she can get today.
“They’re here,” her husband says, standing to greet two men walking toward them.
Source Romper.com
When a gestational surrogate delivers a baby after ten months or so of carrying another person’s child, their job, so to speak, is done. With the baby safely in the hands of its parents, the story seems to be over, but for surrogate moms, that couldn’t be further from the truth. For all information out there on gestational surrogacy, the postpartum period isn’t talked about much.
There are a lot of misconceptions around surrogacy; for starters, it’s important to understand the difference between traditional and gestational surrogacy. In traditional surrogacy, the surrogate uses her own eggs to create an embryo — she is genetically related to the baby, and this arrangement has become pretty rare in the U.S. for obvious legal reasons. In gestational surrogacy, there’s no genetic link — the intended parents are the ones to donate the egg and sperm in a process using in vitro fertilization.
Source Brit + Co
For many of us, experiences with fertilitytreatment have been confined to Hollywood. We cheered on Mindy Kaling’s character from The Mindy Project as she opened her fertility clinic in downtown NYC. Then we devoured news articles about why Kim Kardashian and Kanye West chose to hire a gestational surrogate for their youngest child. There’s a reason for this distance: Fertility services are dang pricey. After Carrot co-founder and CEO Tammy Sun froze her eggs (and consequently spent half her savings) at the age of 34, she made it her life’s work to help transform fertility care into an accessible workplace benefit. Now hundreds of trendsetting companies across the US are offering fertility coverage to the millions (yes, millions!) of employees who need it. Fertility treatment is the future, at least according to Sun, so why not just figure it out now?
Read more
Source People
I didn’t always know I wanted to have kids, or even get married. I’m an independent, free-spirited type — but something changed when I married Michael. He’s an amazing teacher and I loved seeing him with kids; the thought of starting a family together excited me. We first started “trying/not trying” soon after we got married at 31, but I told Michael we may have issues; at 14 years old I had been hospitalized with endometriosis. I thought getting pregnant might be a challenge and figured it could take a year or two to conceive. I never imagined it would take close to a decade, or that we wouldn’t use my body to carry the baby.
Source Financial Post
Family law is ever-changing. In one of the summer’s most interesting family law decisions, SH v. DH, Justice Robert Del Frate of the Ontario Superior Court was asked to decide the fate of an embryo which the husband and wife had purchased from a fertility centre in the state of Georgia. The parties signed a contract and bought donated eggs and sperm for US$11,500.
Source IFL Science
The Indiana Medical Licensing Board voted last week to bar a 79-year-old retired doctor from ever practicing in the state again after genetics searches on ancestry sites found he had illegitimately fathered dozens of children whose mothers he had artificially inseminated with his own sperm. In each case, he reportedly told the couples he was using sperm from a suitable donor, the father, or a combination of the two.
Source The Times
A fertility treatment that focuses on correcting problems in the reproductive system has achieved success for older women, a study found.
An Irish fertility expert found that restorative reproductive medicine (RRM) helped women become pregnant even when IVF had failed for them.
The study said 74 out of 128 women who completed RRM at Neo Fertility, a treatment clinic based in Dublin, gave birth to full-term healthy babies after two or more failed IVF treatments.
Source Wired
The UK is heavily reliant on foreign sperm donors – and Denmark is responsible for more than its fair share. Then along came Brexit…
Brexit keeps surprising us. The latest industry that might be under threat if the UK leaves the EU without a deal is allegedly that of sperm donation.
Specifically, Danish sperm donation.
The Department of Health and Social Care revealed last week that 3,000 sperm samples were imported from Denmark to the UK in the last year, and nightmare scenarios were quick to flourish. The risk of Danish sperm being held up at British borders because of unclear custom arrangements seems to have never been so real.
Source Daily Mail
It’s 40 years since the first IVF baby was born, bringing joy to thousands of couples who might otherwise have been unable to conceive.
But while the NHS estimates that one in seven couples will still have difficulty conceiving, the fertility industry remains full of bamboozling jargon – from zygote to oligozoospermia.
Despite the wealth of information and advice now available, the language and terminology used can often be complicated, making the process confusing and overwhelming.
Here Dr Victoria Walker, leading fertility expert at Spain’s Institut Marques, has de-coded a list of the most confusing medical terms used in the fertility industry.
Source Leadership
The Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (RCOG) recently draw the attention of In vitro fertilization (IVF) experts on a very salient observation that egg freezing had tripled in five years. RCOG also stated that a large number of those who go for egg freezing are over 37 years and these group of people have lower chances of success when they would need the eggs. This, researchers have linked to the fact that more women now postpone raising families due to many social factors including educational/career pursuits and the unavailability of the right partners.
Read more
Source NY Times
To couples at the end of their ropes who wanted children but could not conceive them for medical reasons, Dr. Donald Cline was a savior of sorts, offering to match the women with sperm from anonymous men resembling their partners.
Many couples sought Dr. Cline out at his Indianapolis-area fertility clinic during the 1970s and ’80s. They had children, who grew up and had children of their own.
What the couples did not know was that on an untold number of occasions, Dr. Cline was not using the sperm of anonymous donors.
Source INews
Becki Ellsmore has never cooed over babies in the way she’s seen her friends do. And while she says she’ll never say never to having a family, it’s not been a priority.
Yet the 35-year-old has not one, but two biological children – of around four and five – who she has never met. She was compensated £750 each time for donating her eggs, but with trips back and forth from her home town in Oxford to the clinic in London during the two-week process, the money is hardly a motivating factor.
Source The Federalist
Karen, a friend who watches over the Facebook page for a film Jennifer Lahl and I made, “Anonymous Father’s Day,” recently posted a HuffPost Personal article titled, “I Chose To Be A Surrogate Mother. I Didn’t Know It Would Break My Heart.”
The author, Lindsay, became a surrogate mother in her early 20s, without ever having children of her own. Her first pregnancy was a surrogate pregnancy. It was a traditional rather than gestational surrogacy, meaning she used her own egg rather than a donor egg. She did another surrogate pregnancy, giving birth for the second time 15 months later, before having a child that she kept “as a single mom by choice.”
Source EuroNews
Dozens of Spanish families who have had children via surrogate mothers in Ukraine are being blocked from returning home, with the Spanish government citing issues of medical malpractice and human trafficking in the industry.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Wednesday that it will deal with around 30 families affected on a case-by-case basis, noting that it has “an obligation to preserve and protect the rights” of the women who carried and gave birth to the children.
